King: Region not prepared enough for hurricanes

Bill King says that despite lessons we should have learned from Lili, Rita and Ike, coastal storm surge protection still is sorely lacking.

By Bill King

Published 2:59 pm, Saturday, September 13, 2014

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King: Region not prepared enough for hurricanes

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Ten years ago yesterday, I wrote my first commentary for this paper. At the time, I was the mayor of Kemah and two years earlier, I had the daylights scared out of me by a hurricane named Lili. Lili was forecast to be a Category 3 storm, which would have flooded a good portion of Kemah. While the storm seemed to be heading straight for us, forecasters believed that a front coming through at the same time would push it to the east into Louisiana. Nonetheless, it seemed prudent to look at my city's contingency plans.

Only problem was that we did not have one. I contacted Galveston County and the state; they did not have much of a plan, either.

As Lili churned across the Gulf, still heading straight for us, it unexpectedly strengthened to Category 4. If the storm did not take the turn to the east that the National Hurricane Center was forecasting, we were going to be sitting ducks. Fortunately, the storm did turn eastward, then weakened and hit along a relatively sparsely populated area of the Louisiana coast.

Nonetheless, I was left shaken by the experience. If Lili had not turned and weakened, but instead had slammed into our area as a Category 4 storm, it would have been an unmitigated disaster. Thousands would have been killed and most of Kemah wiped out.

So I began visiting regional and state officials to find out if there were any disaster preparation plans. Basically, I learned, there were none. The Texas Department of Public Safety, charged with emergency management at the state level, gave me the agency's 30-page evacuation plan for the Houston area. I discovered our town's police chief had never seen it, nor could I find anyone else who had.

The first two pages consisted of general instructions about how various law enforcement agencies were to staff and direct traffic at various intersections throughout the region. The last 28 pages were a list of those intersections and the agency assigned to them.

That was it.

There was no plan to contraflow the freeways. I was told the state had studied contraflow and concluded it would not work, which was surprising as every other Gulf Coast state had an extensive contraflow evacuation plan.

No one had given any serious thought to how nursing homes or hospitals would be evacuated. No thought had been given to those who did not have vehicles. No one had considered how people would evacuate their pets or how they might react to being told to leave their pets behind. All of these turned out to be tremendous problems in the disastrous Hurricane Ike evacuation just a few months later.

So I spent a good part of the next two years meeting with various regional and state officials expressing my concerns. I wrote letters, proposed possible solutions, studied other states' plans and shared those with our officials. For the most part, I was blown off. I frequently was accused of being the "Chicken Little" of hurricanes.

So I did what Americans do when our government is not doing its job: I went to the press. And on Sept. 12, 2004, the Chronicle printed my op-ed predicting what would happen in the event a major hurricane evacuation became necessary. The following spring, the Chronicle followed up with a series of articles that detailed the lack of planning or potential problems in the event of an area-wide evacuation.

Unfortunately, government officials again paid little heed. That fall, about 130 Houstonians died in the chaos of the Hurricane Rita evacuation. More people died in that evacuation than succumbed to any hurricane in Texas other than the great 1900 storm.

After Rita, regional officials undertook a detailed review of our evacuation plans. As a result they were greatly improved, which by and large was responsible for the more orderly evacuation during Hurricane Ike.

But there was a lesson we learned in that process: It is virtually impossible to evacuate the entire region ahead of a major hurricane. Some people will simply not go. Some are not able to go. And if a storm develops quickly in the Gulf, as they sometimes do, there is simply not enough time for everyone who needs to get out to do so. That is why I and many others came to the conclusion that we cannot solely rely on evacuation plans. We also need some kind of storm surge-suppression system along our coast.

The threat of catastrophe is very real. If you only slightly alter the course of either Rita or Ike to the west, the more populated parts of our region would have felt the full fury of those storms and thousands likely would have been killed. Yet, nine years after Rita and six years after Ike, other than an improved evacuation plan, we have done little else to protect ourselves.

In the Chronicle's editorial board meetings this year, I have asked state candidates about storm surge protection. Each pledged that the state finally will come to grips with this issue in the 2015 legislative session. I pray to God they were telling us the truth.

King's column appears Thursday and Sunday. Email King at weking@weking.net and follow him at twitter.com/weking.